II.

Thomas Chatterton.

The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole. Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton\'s family had for more than a century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they had never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations, but these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and people of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the natural, usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not understood, was complacently active. The chests which contained the archives of the church had been broken into by the Vestry, and quantities of old parchment documents, some of them illuminated, had been thrown about. Chatterton\'s father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy\'s mother were used for domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6, had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In 1760 he was sent to Colston\'s Hospital, a school resembling Christ\'s Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age[Pg 435] of 10, a versifier, his Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age of 11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of "invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind of old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as Rowlie\'s, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.

In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane. But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, and, in December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley\'s ancient poems," including "The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The success of Percy\'s ballads from the Old Folio (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first edition of "The Castle of Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in the third century a.d.) of pretending to have found the tale in an ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters by the same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and gratefully, but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his youth and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his profession, adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness of the papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton, and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent back the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no more of the matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had committed suicide in[Pg 436] London. After an attempt to support himself by hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24 August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister; twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to go abroad as a surgeon\'s mate.

Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French, Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza. His touches in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But he never quite escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the eighteenth century; and his best inspiration is derived from Percy\'s "Reliques". What he might have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the wonted abnormality of genius.

William Cowper.

The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731, Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen\'s "Sense and Sensibility" we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the rival charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and Wordsworth. He was averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation of Homer he preferred a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he "had his eye on the object". His exit from the triumphant common sense of the eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion, the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers. They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the populace; and Cowper\'s own sympathy with their bodies, with their[Pg 437] poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him akin to Wordsworth.

Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of the rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single small child, and we might think that his sufferings had their share in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his public school, Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him; he made many clever and lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at Westminster, though he learned no more in one way than to write "lady\'s Greek without the accents

"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope\'s metre. But Cowper, despite the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for the old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper\'s birch,

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke!
Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part,
Christian in name and infidel in heart.

In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies

Less for improvement than to tickle spite.

Macaulay\'s victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a solicitor; and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered\' his life; in a private asylum he was suddenly converted, and recovered, and religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness,[Pg 438] now, when the black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he lived retired, the friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy himself with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error," "Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one of the speakers in the dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea-drinking Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution, which he took very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the well-known lines on Pope occur; he

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.

Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist, Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress of Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with the well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as "flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are publicly birched.

It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa," out of which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he

Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,
The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.

[Pg 439]

This introduces a rural digression.

Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o\'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted.

We think of

a river winding slow
By cattle, on an endless plain;
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow streaks of rain.

How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement," welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, "The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen of the softest kind," he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough\'s, and studies of cattle like Morland\'s. "The Task" won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may still be read with sympathy and pleasure.

Many of Cowper\'s shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories: "The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad; the ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;

the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which Cowper\'s translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The Swallow," "Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the[Pg 440] original, as is "The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters such as "The Dog and the Water-lily"; and pretty kindly compliments, such as "Gratitude" (to his cousin, Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the "Epitaph on a Hare," and the "To Mary" (of 1793). His "John Gilpin" is an unusual frolic.

The translations, in blank verse, of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper\'s opinion, had done all that could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially that of Cowper, cannot convey, as Pope does, the sense of the speed of the great epic; nor was Cowper\'s scholarship exempt from curious errors. He was overworked; Mrs. Unwin fell into the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible melancholy returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away" (1798), are penned by no "maniac\'s hand," nor can a poet have written them without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800.

His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and their delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was much happiness in a life so blameless.

Literature in Scotland (1550-1790).

Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, Robert Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his predecessors in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of James V, when Sir David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of the Court and of the people. It is not easy to fit some remarks on Scottish literature after Sir David Lyndsay into a chronological sequence parallel with the development of literature in England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I produced no effect on their English contemporaries: the King\'s "Reulis and Cautelis" in poetical criticism, and his "Basilikon Doron," a treatise on king-craft, with his "Counterblast to Tobacco," and his "Demonology" are the work of a clever general writer, but now only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomery continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar,[Pg 441] though Scott shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while Montgomery survives in an allegory of the old sort, "The Cherry and the Slae"; and an old-fashioned "flyting". Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London with the wits of the time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in 1640) and William Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the Scots vernacular. The most distinguished of these poets William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben\'s rather crabbed criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native country, Drummond celebrated the event in "Forth Feasting," a panegyric in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his sonnets have charm and are not forgotten; but the times darkened, and Drummond (who showed common sense and public spirit when Charles I unjustly persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advising the King to read George Buchanan\'s book on the Royal power in Scotland), was unlikely to find an audience for his learned verse during the subsequent troubles. His "Cypress Grove," a meditation in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing and cadences, while the periods are not over-long and over burdened. But the brief years in which Scottish wits might have learned many lessons from the great contemporary literature of England soon went by; and Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings over theology and sermons, and to bitter tracts and pamphlets, valuable to the historical but not to the literary student.

The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming Cavalier lyric, "My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses sincere but rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his King\'s, but he "tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds". The favourite measure of Burns was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, in his vernacular elegy over a piper,

On bagpipes now no body blaws
Sen Habbie\'s dead.

The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611?-1660) is an imperishable monument of the author\'s amazing wealth of strange[Pg 442] vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier who fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a kind of immortality by his success. His translation is final and decisive; in which it stands alone. Of the preachers and controversialists, bitter or humorous, there is no space to speak, but the saintly character and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) live in his Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter and his other expository writings. The historical works of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, are English, except in their occasional Scotticisms, as much of his life was spent in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels and springs of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part in great affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine, politician, and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian precision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself.

His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this "Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gossip. His "History of My Own Times" was judiciously kept from publication till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a safe authority either in what he insinuates most basely, against William III, or states, without an atom of corroboration, against James II. In the latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted and given circulation to Burnet\'s narrative.

By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden\'s phrase, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636?-1691). Beginning with a "heroic romance," "Aretina," influenced by Sidney\'s "Arcadia" (1660), and the French school of heroic romances, and with verses, in which he did not shine, Mackenzie, in the "Religio Stoici" (1663) shows that he, like R. L. Stevenson, has been "the sedulous ape" of Sir Thomas Browne. He has many admirably harmonious sentences, a very lively wit, and a becomingly pensive air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men in the dark," the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant, have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose,

At once his country\'s glory and her shame.

[Pg 443]

But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away from pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as great legal merit; his observations on the persecution of witches are of great interest; and the worst of his "Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland" is the fragmentary condition of the manuscript. Mackenzie was the cause of the foundation of the Advocates\' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution of 1688 he retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed.

The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, would gladly have taken all knowledge for his province; his was a most inquiring mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his parochial duties ever left behind him so huge a mass of unpublished manuscript. His great work is "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution". He was, of course, a partisan, but an honest partisan; he consulted all accessible documents, and often printed them at full length; he occasionally makes errors in the direction of his bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects not one of the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to the extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his "Analecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences" (published long after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost-stories, and tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is extremely frail. Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an American divine, as simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the Rev. Cotton Mather. Wodrow, after 1714, saw the beginnings of "Latitudinarianism," or "Moderatism," in the Kirk: young ministers began to study the "Characteristics" of that polite philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713); to doubt whether virtuous heathens and Catholics must inevitably be excluded from salvation; to wander from the Calvinism of John Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and to regard the chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These Moderates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates[Pg 444] attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish themselves in secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, being patrons of the stage.

To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among the clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and life of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694-1746) a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on ?sthetics and on moral philosophy. But for a true, lively, and Humorous picture of ministers who loved society, the stage, and the company of the wits, in London and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobiography, posthumously published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk (1722-1805). In youth he had revelled and drunk deep with the wicked Lord Lovat, and that stern Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lord Grange, well remembered for his energy in packing off his termagant wife to seclusion on the Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir John Cope at Prestonpans; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the Thames, by the accuracy of his driving at golf; he had championed his brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by writing the once famous play of "Douglas"; and he lived to be the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter Carlyle" from his noble presence, knew every one worth knowing in Scotland; and if we think him a kind of good-humoured pagan, he is nevertheless reported to have been an excellent parish minister. "For human pleasure" in the reading, the memoirs of this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the literary revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in the period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in the cases of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton during the Restoration. But the papers of Addison and Steele, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," went everywhere, were eagerly read in Scotland, and provoked imitation in the matter of style. Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns: and men corresponded with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie had corresponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop[Pg 445] of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wigmaker to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Evergreen," a collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made by George Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague (1568).[1] Ramsay\'s "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a medley of old Scots and new songs and lyrics: the new made by Ramsay and his disciples to be sung to the old Scots tunes. The old verses were the basis of the new, which are a mixture of the simple ancient matter with that of the eighteenth century. Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing Blind Harry\'s "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a contemporary of Ramsay: they wrote to each other "epistles" in verse, in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay\'s "Gentle Shepherd" (1725) contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd life than is common in pastoral poetry: and Ramsay\'s elegies, in Burns\'s favourite metre, on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, an ale-wife, were models for Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no friend of the more rigid Presbyterian party, and once, at least, in the pretty song of "The Blackbird," he showed the colours of the Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754) was actually out with Prince Charles in 1745; his slim volume of 1744, "Poems on Several Occasions," contains little that dwells in the memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow,

Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny Bride.

In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on the romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was taken for an old ballad, "Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that he ever learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed "a poetic child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". Ladies like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my heart licht I wad dee," and Miss Jean Elliot of Minto, with "The Flowers of the Forest," a lament for Flodden, were surpassed in the number, and equalled in the merit............